Two favorite Miami classical events that usually take place around this time of year have just begun or will get under way today: The Mainly Mozart Festival and the Miami International Piano Festival. The Mainly Mozart Festival (this is the 18th edition) got under way May 15 at the Westin Colonnade Hotel in Coral Gables, […]

The siren song of opera first called to Russell Thomas when he was an 8-year-old boy in Cutler Bay and heard a radio broadcast of Weber’s “Oberon,” starring Placido Domingo and Birgit Nilsson. “I was intrigued by the sound these people were making,” Thomas says. “And I wanted to know how they did it.” After […]

One of the more interesting things I discovered, silly as this sounds, when I first saw the Jean-Paul Rappeneau film of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (with Gerard Depardieu in the title role) more than 20 years ago, was how good a play it was. Having never seen it in French, only several bad versions […]

April 25 marks the last appearance of the Greek pianist and conductor Zoe Zeniodi as the associate conductor of the Frost Symphony Orchestra at the University of Miami. She’ll be leading the orchestra in the Symphony No. 3 (in E-flat, Op. 97, Rhenish) of Robert Schumann, which she decribes as “a beautiful work,” particularly the […]

The season is swiftly approaching its end, and this weekend marks one of the last waves of heavy concert activity before Thanksgiving rolls around again. Two concerts this weekend offer some good off-the-beaten-path pieces of repertoire mixed in along with some core repertory, which just goes to show that if you know where to look, […]

Each new earthquake aftershock off the coast of Japan comes brings additional misery for the Asian nation and a renewed upswelling of sympathetic grief worldwide. It also creates an increased desire to help out, and later this month, that’s just what a concert at Florida International University will aim to do. Pianist Valentina Lisitsa, a fine […]

In the days before the symphony orchestra came to dominate the American musical scene, there was the wind band. That’s how most Americans in the most of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century came to learn the big orchestral works, tunes from the hottest operas of the time, and fancy treatments […]

When it comes to the basic human love of music-making, it comes to the human voice. And there’s nothing quite as astounding as the kind of music that can be made from massed voices working together in a choir. This weekend and in the coming week is an important period for choral singing in South […]

There’s always something about an outdoor evening concert that creates a sense of occasion. Maybe it’s a night of perfect weather, or a wonderful outing with a date, or perhaps a piece of music that you hear with new ears and suddenly understand its greatness. Saturday night (Mar 19), Orchestra Miami repeats a concert it […]

Back when I was a neophyte jazz pianist in my high school jazz band, there were certain colleges you thought about attending where you could continue to study this wonderful art form. The big conservatories were out, on the grounds that they were more interested in classical, but the Berklee College of Music in Boston, […]